Religious Education

Lesson 4.3
FamilySearch Indexing

What is FamilySearch Indexing? 
The FamilySearch Indexing (www.familysearchindexing.org) project is a collaborative effort designed to facilitate the indexing of millions of genealogical and historical records. Currently, there are over 100,000 active volunteer indexers indexing some one million names per day.  This will be an on-going project for many years to come.  As the indexing of each set of records is completed, such as a census or collection of vital records, those records are made available at the Record Search website for anyone to search. FamilySearch Indexing is compatible with Microsoft Windows, up to the Vista edition and Apple MacOS X version 10.5.x or later. FamilySearch Indexing is not fully supported by Linux. 

Indexing
Images are uploaded to the FamilySearch Indexing website and then made available for volunteers to index.  Records are available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.    Once an individual has registered as an indexer, he or she may download images to index. FamilySearch Indexing is available to anyone who would like to participate.  The indexing process is simple and straight-forward: indexers read a document and transcribe the information they read into a spreadsheet.   To ensure quality, each record is assigned to two indexers.  An arbitrator then compares the two spreadsheets and resolves any differences.  When completed, indexed records are uploaded to Record Search for researchers to access.

Use of Records
Once records are indexed, they are made available online for the public use. They can be accessed by using the Record Search website (www.pilot.familysearch.org) as discussed in lesson 4.2.

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